Social-Business

I have been working in the area of integrating social capabilities with Portal as aggregation platform.

We are gradually working towards exposing extra-net and intranet based social capabilities of IBM Connections on Portal .. which will help enterprise as well as followers outside to be part of confluence which is business relevant.

First - Capabilities of the IBM Connections as a enterprise social platform can be better understood here :

Resuming from my last post - a key thing I am going to discuss is - how are these software systems, social enablers for any business [inside and outside] and for the ecosystem [landscape, environment] they exist in. A Social Business is one that embraces and cultivates a spirit of collaboration and community throughout its organization — both internally and externally.

IBM has identified three distinct characteristics of a Social Business:

A Social Business is engaged—deeply connecting people, including customers, employees, and partners, to be involved in productive, efficient ways.

A Social Business is transparent—removing boundaries to information, experts and assets, helping people align every action to drive business results.

A Social Business is nimble—speeding up business with information and insight to anticipate

So - the question would be, what do we need to do differently without drastic disruption to existing business processes, such that these software-system changes, enhance the collaboration and innovation at the systemic level :

Essentially we have following elements to look at, to evaluate how social aspect of the business / organization can lead to innovation or improvements:

Engaging Experience : Whether its intranet for the employees or extra-net for customers and business partners - every segment wants to have engaging experience in the form of 'Collaborating NOW' element i.e employees need online communities to drive the business objectives or goals, Partners needs them for interacting with vendors and other stakeholders in the business ... every small step towards a business decision is recorded or should be available in the form of activity streams. Ability to reproduce any business event in the form of A/V assets and share it for the the benefit of larger audience through social media such that feedback on the event , its content drives the improvement and perhaps innovation. Add to all this a mailing capability which is not a silo but aware of all such happenings and with minimal action, data flows from each of these capabilities bidirectionally - e.g a mail could become a activity for tracking purposes, a file from social media can flow into email as attachment or identities are managed via social directory inside the mail as business card. Typically in an enterprise 2.0 environment we would want solutions packaged on the common platform ... HRMS, Payroll etc for the intranet scenario OR Retail or banking solutions OOTB for the extranet / internet scenario, which provides a integrated and engaging experience as opposed to static web systems handling each one separately. Culture of collaborating 'NOW' is key ingredient for fostering innovation and unifies culturally or demographically diverse business [employee and customer base]. IBM is a very good example.

Discover OR Expertise locator, knowledge management, collaboration - These set of capabilities or abilities help in terms of having informal processes for learning and falling back on these resources as a knowledge asset down the line - something we term as : Social Learning processes. Wikis are a good example of such a capability. Forums for dedicated discussion on key business or common interest areas within a community, Blogs : help in knowledge dissemination by SMEs and over a period of time these resources are tagged, responed, recommended and eventually some of them get established as a best practice or a innovated process for a business problem. Recommendations work well in terms of getting the most popular, most visited, best rated or something like 'adjudged top submission'. All of this data is transparently available and no parallel systems are needed to churn these sought after assets. Another aspect of discovery in a social business would be 'crowd sourcing applications' - i.e we have the capability of hosting apps that help to do a mundane task faster or efficiently - examples would be Gadgets or widgets developed and deployed by the end users. Mashups are a very good example of such a capability. In one way these kind of capabilities help in grooming or training the next level of employees, busines partner or even vendors - which indirectly leads to lesser expenses on the business orientation or awraeness related trainings.

Optimize for faster insights : With explosion of data, information and various forms of assets .... How do we make sense out of it and yet be able to harness that knowledge - Analytics is one encompassing realm, which we can use in different ways to leverage the social benefits for a business. Running analytics on the social media to provide insight about assets shared and used help in promoting the right content. Real time monitoring or moderation allow us to manage the risks of wider availability and impact of these capabilities inside and outside the business. Workforce dashboards or analytics provide on the fly insight about a business unit, team or a community. One of the obvious benefit is the awareness about the diversity of each segment and yet be able to address each one of them effectively.

Finally -:

Delivery channels OR Reach : - End users are better aligned and relate well with software systems which provide consistent user experience. whether you blog or do a chatting - if experience is similar irrespective of the channels (like desktop app to Rich Internet applications to mobile), It leads to greater productivity and throughput from the software systems as well as its users. A employee can easily switch the context from browser to a smart gadget and yet be able to take a business chat or contribute on discussion forum or ideation process while on the move. Business is not limited to fixed cycles of productivity, instead is dependent on the comfort level available to the users of these systems. These capabilities also lead to reduced capital and operational expenses by eliminating (or delay) the recurring needs of upgrading Systems [H/w, S/w]. Wide availability of these capabilities and the user experience are also important building blocks of a social business

To summarize the capabilities and the known/demonstrated benefits of these software systems to help a business become Social :

Looking at the stack I have mentioned in previous blog posts - A confluence of Online interaction through chat and conferencing capability, IBM Connections capabilities, OOTB applications like banking and retail systems, eForms for workflow scenarios, Integrated analytics framework, Enterprise/integrated search capability, in built support for smart devices and finally the most important part - Aggregation system to host all of this as one system and realm - IBM Websphere Portal.

In my last blog ; I touched upon and referenced the framework for organizations to be social and overview of IBM's social software offering - IBM Connections.

The framework I referred to talks about the compelling reasons for the organizations to adopt social or 'more social' business pattern i.e All employees , Customers and Partners can collaborate in one realm as against the current trend of Employees on Intranet and emails, Customers and Partners on Hosted sites and emails.

A summary theme of the frame work is :

Social business accelerates communication and collaboration across networks of employees, customers and partners

Enterprises may use social content to capture and share expertise and best practices, making ad hoc processes more efficient and transparent

Social business enables new business insights by analyzing social data to gain a better understanding of business situations and the decision-making process

With advent of social business paradigm, a enterprise can create a single platform for all the stakeholders to be collaborating seamlessly and also data so generated provides better information and faster decisions .... The visual below provides the compositional view of social business framework .....

This whole scenario mentioned above is also reflected in Exceptional Web experience suite IBM has announced -

Consider a scenario where enterprise Portal service provides all mailing / collaboration, intranet and extranet integration and the social aspect is covered by extending IBM Connections on to the IBM Portal....

A very interesting topic to ponder or muse over is how contemporary software is changing the way we live and do business.

I believe the current generation of software systems (or even solutions) are reasonably equipped with the awareness w.r.t the complexities of challenges/issues in the personal or

professional spheres of business. If we look at how we used to communicate and analyze the inputs for a problem solving / decision making few years ago versus how we do it now -

A key differentiator would be the speed of execution supported & enabled by the various software systems around us. These software systems have permeated every operational

space for human thinking, analysis , decison making and communication.

Today we have deep domain expertise embedded in these software systems, whether we talk of Business Intelligence, Marketing Operations, Logistics systems, OLTP, Content

generation and management systems and eventually a key integration layer which ties all of this data together to create a powerful realm of social software systems.

A business typically deals with overlapped phases of : Research,Strategy , Planning, Execution and Control. Contemporary software systems have made it possible to actually

interlink each of these phases in any growing enterprsie such that results / decision making is based more on strong data and less on heuristics. Research is based less on

projection models and more on the actual data, business has generated through the various cycles {real time or standalone transactional systems}. Strategies are based on mines of

data available in public or commercial space supported by these software systems, identifying the gaps or opportunities by the available data points and relying less on silos of institutional knowledge.

A key capabilitiy enabled by these software systems is 24x7 model of the business wherein a business entity can choose to be proactive and interactive with its entire ecosystem

of sourcing , processing and consuming communities around it and create a differentiating factor in the business space they operate in. These very aspects fuel the next level of

the next cycle. These changes driven by the software system are also bringing in the cultural and structural changes in terms of effectiveness of a given team or organization within a business entity. Yet another way to look at how the software systems are driving the collective wisdom .... take a look at this interesting video :

New markets are being
explored, New customer segments are being reached out to and yet newer business models are evolving and getting established as well by the help of same

software systems... what normally would take few business cycles to know the efficacy of a model, discussing and establishing it through
print and
publication happens in a new